1. Field of the Invention
The present application relates generally to digital video processing and more particularly to the automated extraction of objects from a video stream.
2. Description of the Background Art
Video has become ubiquitous on the Web. Millions of people watch video clips everyday. The content varies from short amateur video clips about 20 to 30 seconds in length to premium content that can be as long as several hours. With broadband infrastructure becoming well established, video viewing over the Internet will increase.
However, unlike the hyperlinked static Web pages that a user can interact with—video watching on the Internet is, today, a passive activity. Users do not interact with the video. One way for users to be able to interact with the video is by creation of video hyperlinks, wherein an object in a video becomes clickable to enable some predefined action. The location of objects in the video stream and their identity are determined. One way to do that is manually going from frame to frame and outlining the objects of interest. Such manual outlining is, clearly, a very time-consuming, expensive process that will not provide a scalable solution as video viewing continues to explode over the Internet.